Ricky Martin

At the time Ricky Martin performed his hit single “La Copa del la Vida” on the Grammy Awards stage and ignited the Latin pop craze in the US he had already been in the music business for a decade and a half, with sixteen albums to his name, four of them solo; appeared in several TV shows and films, including a major role in General Hospital and the Spanish translation of Disney’s Hercules; and acted on Broadway as Marius in a production of Les Misérables. “Livin’ la Vida Loca” – a song famous enough to boast a full-length Wikipedia article – soon followed, along with new albums, new screen time, and a new philanthropic organization dedicated to improving the lives of children with a focus on tackling human trafficking.

Although he has only been widely out as gay since 2010, speculation on his sexuality had been rampant ever since he began gaining popularity in the US. In an early interview with Barbara Walters she pressured him to come up, which she now says she regrets because his silence was taken as an admission; fortunately for Martin, his career does not appear to have suffered, and he is still actively touring.

Martin’s well-decorated Twitter is available for viewing here.

Joan Roughgarden

Sporting a CV with over 180 published articles and eight books, Joan Roughgarden is a prolific ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She is best known for Evolution’s Rainbow, in which she argues that Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection fails to account for the great diversity of sexual and gendered behavior in animals, and assumes a more competitive model than exists in reality. (The truism that smaller gametes necessitate less investment in child-rearing fails, for example, when applied to seahorses, a species in which the female deposits eggs into the male’s egg sac. For a more in-depth explanation of Roughgarden’s views, see her TEDx talk here.) As of the time of this writing she is working as an adjunct professor for the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology, her latest post in a lengthy academic career.

Roughgarden attributes her novel critiques in part to her quest to make sense of her own trans status, and hopes that input from sexual and gender minorities will add nuance to evolutionary theory.

Manvendra Singh Gohil

Prince Manvendra had a dramatic coming out experience. Although his sexual orientation became semi-public after a nervous breakdown in 2002 for which he was hospitalized, it wasn’t until the story hit the press – and The Oprah Winfrey Show – in the mid-2000s that he became an internationally recognized gay celebrity. At the time of this writing is is the only out contemporary member of the Indian royalty. (For more details about his personal life, try this Huffington Post interview.)

While much of Manvendra’s fame comes from his title, he is an accomplished activist, and runs a foundation he started dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS and improving the lives of LGBT people in the Indian state of Gujarat. He has spoken at a number of high-profile events, including the São Paulo gay pride parade and the Euro Pride gay festival, and appeared on the BBC reality show Undercover Princes.

P. L. Travers

Pamela Lyndon Travers was a 20th century actor, poet, and author of books that she insisted weren’t only for children. Although the recent Disney take on her story contains numerous inaccuracies, it is true that she was responsible for creating the iconic character of Mary Poppins. After the film version of her first Poppins book was completed she swore off sequels, citing the overdone cheeriness and animated sequences; she even went so far as to ban the movie’s composers from writing additional music for the stage adaptation.

In her private life Travers was not a solitary person. She traveled widely and adopted one half on a pair of twins (she left the other behind because of an astrological reading). Her sexual orientation is a matter of some debate, with Wikipedia describing her relationships with women as “ambiguous“. A plausible interpretation of her life is that she had both male and female lovers, including a woman she lived with for a decade, and was a member of a mostly-lesbian mystic writing circle; therefore, she is listed here as bisexual, although she never referred to herself as such.

Miyazawa Kenji

Although Miyazawa Kenji’s work went largely unrecognized during his lifetime he is now known as one of Japan’s foremost poets and authors of children’s literature. He was a committed Buddhist and a vegetarian – a rarity in a country that values seafood as a staple – and frequently wrote about interspecies dialogues, among other examples of empathic communication. One of his better known pieces, “Strong in the Rain,” exemplifies his focus on nature and self-sacrifice; in it, he longs for a robust body so that he can better serve his neighbors, even as they look down on him for his ordinariness. When the 2011 earthquake hit Japan the poem gained memetic popularity, becoming a symbol of Japanese resilience. (Several more poems, in English and German, are available here, along with a short article on a choreography based on his works. A few more are available for downloading in English here. Works in the original Japanese can be found here. For a more detailed analysis of Miyazawa’s themes and techniques, try this website.)

Miyazawa is included on this blog with the caveat that speculation about his asexuality does not appear to be (at least per a cursory search) rooted in anything he himself expressed, but rather his seeming lack of interest in any romantic or sexual connection. His writing is entirely devoid of sexual themes and he was never known to have taken any sort of partner; in fact, his deepest connection was reputed to be with nature.

 

 

Ruthie Foster

Blues music has a rich history of queer singers going all the way back to stars like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Foster’s own Grammy-nominated tunes blend folk, jazz, gospel, country, and – yes – blues, sticking her in both Contemporary and Traditional award categories. She learned her trade from a combination of church piano and touring with a band during her stint in the Navy, a history that she shares (along with her sexual orientation) in her album The Truth According to Ruthie Foster. Although her initial success was with a more folk sound, she has since transitioned back to her blues roots.

Her homepage, complete with a music section containing several streaming songs, can be found here. For a full 20 minutes of Foster’s music, click here.

 

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs quite literally wrote the book – or twelve books, as it happened – on homosexuality. He pioneered the idea that sexual orientation is inborn, and accompanied it with calls for civil equality. His term for gay men (‘Urning’) was coined in an effort to separate sexual acts from the actors and emphasize the centrality of sexual orientation as a part of an individual’s identity; although it was later replaced by ‘homosexual’, ‘Urning’ (derived from a portion of Plato’s Symposium) was the first term of its kind.

Although his belief that gay men had inherently female minds would read as curious (or offensive) to modern audiences, ‘anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa’ (‘a female soul trapped in a male body’) became a popular paradigm. Noting that hermaphroditism was possible in animals, he theorized that the only way for ‘natural’ opposite-sex attraction to be interrupted would be if (for example) a gay man wasn’t really a man at all, but something in between. (While it is possible that Ulrichs truly did have a ‘female soul’ – that is, was transgender – and used his own gendered experiences as a theoretical foundation, there is little evidence save for the above phrasing and a childhood insistence that he was a girl. As a result, this blog uses male pronouns; however, it is impossible to be sure either way.)

Florence Nightingale

While it would be misleading to refer to Nightingale as a nurse – he ceased practicing altogether after the Crimean war due to ill health, and his accomplishments there may have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes – he can certainly claim credit as a public health theoretician and statistician, as well as a legal reformer targeting overly restrictive prostitution laws and the founder of the world’s first secular nursing school. He invented the polar area diagram, charted the course for sanitation improvement in India, and wrote extensively on feminism and theology. (This obituary offers an additional summary, though it has the disadvantage of being somewhat melodramatic.) Nightingale also has a museum named after him in London, along with numerous other honors.

Nightingale’s place on this blog is somewhat controversial. While GayHeroes.com claims he was a lesbian, all the evidence presented is circumstantial, and at least one biographer believes the rumor is entirely without historical backing. While it is true that Nightingale never married, that may have been due to any number of causes: some permutation of asexuality; an overpowering passion for his work; incapacitating pain; religious motivation; or, perhaps, an exclusive attraction to women. However, as per a book cited on Wikipedia, Nightingale allegedly preferred male pronouns, which is enough to – with the usual disclaimers about ambiguity – qualify him for a position here. While it is impossible to know for sure how he saw himself and whether that identity would map onto a contemporary understanding of transgenderism, it is at least a possibility, and seems to be backed by more evidence than the lesbianism conjecture.

Sassafras Lowrey

Lowrey’s critically acclaimed debut anthology, Kicked Out, was built on the foundations of Portland zine experience and hir own time on the streets. The exile came quickly: after the fellow dog trainer who had taken hir in cracked open hir diary and, in hir words, “realized I was a dyke,” all it took was a short phone call to the school to notify them that she would not be picking Lowrey up that day to leave hir without shelter or the dogs that made up hir pack of friends. Ze credits a local youth shelter and the families of choice ze found there with hir survival.

Now Lowrey maintains several blogs (one linked above), has another anthology (and a novel) in print, is credited in numerous anthologies, and offers lectures on homelessness and hir work. Ze also had a hand in founding Oregon’s Queer Youth Summit, at which ze gave the keynote address in 2013. Hir photography and mixed media art have appeared in galleries across the United States and United Kingdom.

Tallulah Bankhead

Bankhead, an actress whose career carried her between Britain and the United States, was as well known for her outlandish spectacles offstage as on. She starred in a number of well-received theater and film productions, winning several awards and landing a role in an Alfred Hitchcock production. She was nearly cast to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind but was turned down due to age (at the time she was twenty years older than the character) and poor results being photographed in Technicolor.

Bankhead’s less-than-private life was characterized by outrageous quotes and sexually provocative stunts, and were reportedly fueled by the consumption of over 100 cigarettes per day. When she was asked after a skinny dipping episode with a pack of fellow celebrities why she had opted for nudity, she replied, “I just wanted to prove that I was a natural ash blonde.” She was known to sleep with both men and women, and although she never used the word bisexual, she did describe herself as “ambisextrous”.